Cluster / Farm - Pi for recording, MacMini for ComSkip and Transcoding

Channels DVR Server Feature Requests
#1

I am about to upgrade my home server from a very very old MacMini to a very very new one.

I'd love to take advantage of the greater speed compared to a Raspberry Pi for ComSkip and greater capacity for transcoding. One challenge, however, is my home server performs several other services and sometimes requires a reboot. The other services are less sensitive to brief disruptions, compared to recording live TV.

I'm wondering if there's a way or if there could be a way in the future to run the DVR Server in a mini cluster configuration. The Pi would handle the scheduling, recording, while the Mini would run Comskip and maybe transcoding for streaming if/as required, with fallback to the Pi when the Mac is not available.

#2

I had some of your same concerns so I moved everything to Docker. Now I can restart each individual container while not affecting any of the others. The only time they are all affected is with a whole system reboot, which is rare and easy to plan for.

#3

Try Proxmox.

Its a Bare metal VM. So you can run multiple operating systems on one server at the same time. Restarting one OS does not require you to restart others.

#4

I started out with that approach but used VMware instead, but found Docker to be kinder with resources. I currently have 14 containers running doing various things and all the corresponding images total 5.4 GB. That’s hard to beet. I put off giving it a try for years because I didn’t think it could possibly work but I’m a fan.

#5

I run my server on a Mini and have the typical reboots for software updates or other occasional reasons. I just do it when the family isn't watching TV or recordings are going on, hasn't been too hard to manage.

#6

Get a used PC or Mac for a couple hundred bucks, run the OS of your choice and be done with it. Will run circles around a PI and avoid complications. I run on a Windows VM and it's super stable. Windows updates seem to avoid activity, even when I was recording nearly 24 hours a day during the Olympics.